Enterprise Social Networks: A Guided Tour

More enterprises are deploying internal social networks to encourage collaboration and improve productivity. Take a tour of the major platforms and see how they are being used by leading organizations.

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Competitors like to dismiss IBM Connections as some warmed-over version of Lotus Notes and Domino, with a little bit of social functionality sprinkled in. Although it started life as a product from the Lotus division, originally called Lotus Connections, it's an independent Java-based technology platform and one of the early market share leaders. IBM Connections may be of particular interest to organizations with existing investments in other IBM products it integrates with, including Notes, WebSphere portal, Documentum content management, and Sametime instant messaging.

However, it is also one of the leading enterprise social platforms on its own merits and is central to enterprise social initiatives at organizations like TD Bank and 3M.

IBM promises that the next release of IBM Connections will expand the platform's support for the OpenSocial social application integration standard, making it possible to embed a transactional user interface within a social news feed, so users can act on an item without ever leaving the social context.

but this one diferentiates from the others because is the only one that has been developed using Google techonology and is also fully integraded with Google Apps including Google drive and Docs. in short is a Ccollaboration tool + an Intranet + a Social business solution.

You will find corporate and groups wall for discussions where you can share thoughs and files and corporate announcements, a people directory with extended profiles and powerfull searh capabilities and many more features.

Last year, I got the opportunity to research and write in more detail about how to buy and manage these technologies with the publication of Social Collaboration for Dummies. So far, it has a 5-star rating from the reviewers on Amazon - check it out.

The book discusses more options than are mentioned here, and I tried to provide guidance on how to sort through the many products competing for attention in this market and the organizations and applications they are best suited for.

eXo Platform (Open Source Enterprise Social Network and Enterprise Portal) is an open source alternative to most solutions in the list. It's a social collaboration platform that is highly extensible and based on open standards. With eXo you can not only build an enterprise social network, but you can also build a website, a social intranet or a community website

We had a social network built by a company called Social Niche. They are really helpful and installed, customised and host everything and provide ongoing telephone support, which is good. They really helped get us off the ground but I also appreciate they might not be everyone's taste but they deserve this shout out from us - check them out http://www.socialniche.co.uk

I'm always looking for specific case studies on organizations that have put these platforms (or some combination of them) to productive use, so please don't be shy about making introductions if you've got a good story to tell.

I got a flurry of calls after this was published from vendors and their PR representatives wondering why they had been left off the list. Even though I tried to make it clear, this was not a "top 10" list, a lot of people read it that way. I called it a "guided tour" with the idea of presenting a sampling of the styles of enterprise social networking. As it is, the screen shots start to look redundant after a while, and I don't know that showing a dozen more user interface variations would have helped explain the landscape any better. This market is still at an early enough stage that the proliferation of platforms makes it difficult to even attempt a comprehensive list.